Chronicles: Volume 1 by Bob Dylan

Lou Levy, top man at Leeds Music Publishing, took me up in a taxi to West 70th Street. Outside the wind was blowing.

"Columbia have high hopes for you," he said.

I'd met John Hammond at Columbia the previous week.

"Howdya get to town?" he asked.

"Jumped a freight train."

It was pure hokum. But who wants truth, when you can buy the dream?

I was staying in The Village with Ray Van Ronk. Outside the wind was blowing. Ray was like a wolf, living like he was hiding out. It was said that the second world war spelled the end of the Age of Enlightenment, but I wouldn't have known it. I was still in it. I'd read the stuff. Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke ... it was like I knew those guys.

I usually started a book at the middle. It was like I was looking for the education I never got. Thucydides, Gogol, Faulkner. They were like a freeway to my mind.

I wanted to cut a record. But not a 45. I went down to play a song for Woody Guthrie. "You brought that song to life," he said.

I'd been in a motorcycle accident. I just wanted out of the rat race. Journalists, promoters, fans: they were all calling me the tortured conscience of America. I never planned to be an icon. I was just a singer writing songs that made some kind of sense to me. Outside the wind was blowing.

People told me what my lyrics meant. It was news to me. One album was supposedly intensely autobiographical. Let them think so. I knew it was based on a bunch of Chekhov short stories. I just wanted to escape with my wife and raise my kids like any other American.

I was on tour with Tom Petty, but I felt I was going through the motions. I couldn't connect with my songs or find a voice. I'm gonna retire at the end of this, I thought. I'm burnt out.

My manager told me to take time out to rehearse with the Grateful Dead, but I had reached the point when I opened my mouth and nothing came out. The terror was overwhelming, but then, from nowhere, a sound emerged. It wasn't a pretty sound, but it was one I recognised. My songs had come back to me.

I was having lunch with Bonio. We looked deep into each other's reflector shades and liked what we saw.

"God wants you to record with Daniel Lanois," he said.

It was the first Danny had heard of it, but we started to lay some tracks. Outside the wind was blowing. But we stitched and pressed and packed and drove.

John Pankake told me I was trying to be too much like Woody Guthrie. I changed my style. You're now trying to be too much like Robert Johnson. The folk music scene was a paradise, and like Adam I had to leave.